Louis-Ferdinand Céline: Citations en anglais

“The best thing to do when you're in this world, don't you agree, is to get out of it. Crazy or not, scared or not.”

“This instinctive repulsion which tradespeople inspire in men of sensitive feeling is one of the very rare consolations for being so impoverished which are given to those of us who don’t sell anything to anybody.”

“Medicine is a thankless profession. When you get paid by the rich, you feel like a flunky, by the poor like a thief. How can you take a fee from people who can’t afford to eat or go to the movies? Especially when they’re at their last gasp. It’s not easy. You let it ride. You get soft-hearted. And your ship goes down.”

“If you aren't rich you should always look useful.”

“It is of men, and of them only, that one should always be frightened.”

“I have never voted in my life… I have always known and understood that the idiots are in a majority so it's certain they will win.”

“To hell with reality! I want to die in music, not in reason or in prose. People don't deserve the restraint we show by not going into delirium in front of them. To hell with them!”

“The sadness of the world has different ways of getting to people, but it seems to succeed almost every time.”

“An unfamiliar city is a fine thing. That's the time and place when you can suppose that all the people you meet are nice. It's dream time.”

“There's no tyrant like a brain.”

“My trouble is insomnia. If I had always slept properly, I'd never have written a line.”

“That is perhaps what we seek throughout life, that and nothing more, the greatest possible sorrow so as to become fully ourselves before dying.”

“Lots of men are like that, their artistic leanings never go beyond a weakness for shapely thighs.”

“I crawled back into myself all alone, just delighted to observe that I was even more miserable than before, because I had brought a new kind of distress and something that resembled true feeling into my solitude.”

“The plain truth, I may as well admit it, is that I've never been really right in the head.”

“When it becomes really impossible to get away and sleep, then the will to live evaporates of its own accord.”

“You can lose your way groping among the shadows of the past.”

“The beginning of genius is being scared shitless.”

“I warn you that when the princes of this world start loving you it means they are going to grind you up into battle sausage.”